


The Wayward Son

by PiscesPenName



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Depression, Gen, Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Psychological Trauma, Series Finale, Song: Carry on My Wayward Son (Kansas), carry on, kripke'd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:33:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27824557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PiscesPenName/pseuds/PiscesPenName
Summary: What happened following the events of Dean's Death in Carry On. It's not what you think.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

Dean Winchester died in his brother's arms. Cradled by the person he had loved most in all the world. And if one of them had to go, was it that bad a fate, really? To be held by the boy that he had pulled out of a fire all those years ago?

It was a scene they'd reenacted a hundred times in various permutations throughout the years. And so, perhaps, in a way, it was truly Fated that it would end like this. That it had, _somehow_ , to end like this.

Fate was a fickle thing, not entirely explained away by being written by Chuck's hand. After all, in their experiences, if they had been taught one thing about the supernatural, it was that it was unknowable at its core. And that maybe there was something bigger than Chuck. Maybe there always had been. Maybe there always would be.

And so Dean's life slipped away in that warehouse, pinned on an errant rebar like a butterfly in the glass case of some collector. But his life had slipped away with brother's forehead resting against his, safe in the presence of the Life he had saved.

Dean's life had ended there. But Sam's had not. Or at least, his body kept breathing, his heart kept beating, but his soul- that same soul held together by ducktape and safety pins- shattered that day. In a way, Sam Winchester's life had ended with Dean's.

And so he found himself alone. Alone with a little dog named Miracle. And somehow it always ended that way as well. Sam and a dog. Maybe that was Fated too.

Sam gave his brother a hunter's funeral, doing that thing he couldn't bring himself to do all those years ago when the Hellhounds had taken Dean. When Sam had turned on Bobby like a snarling animal, adamant that Dean not be cremated and he had buried his brother alone.

But now, now it was final, and Sam stood by himself and watched the flames lick to ashes everything that he'd loved. No coming back now. It was done.

* * *

The Bunker was big and sprawling and alien without someone else there. He struggled through the routines they'd established together, somehow fed himself, walked the dog, one foot in front of the other, fighting as he only knew how to do. As he had no other _choice_ but to do. As he promised Dean he would do.

Miracle followed his every step, a furry shadow that kept him from sliding too far down the abyss of grief and ending his own story at the hands of his father's pearl handled glock.

He left Dean's room untouched at first, so he could pretend that his brother was there. Just resting. That at any moment he would emerge with a resounding, "Hey S'mmy!"

But he never did. There was only silence, except for the flurry of his own thoughts and grief that chased him day and night.

One day his heart led him down the twisting hall to that empty room and he sat on his brother's bed and wept. Miracle placed his head on Sam's lap and mourned with him, as he always seemed to do. Everything was as Dean had left it. Two empty beers at his desk. A job application on the dresser. Quiet. Undisturbed. Waiting on their owner to come back.

Being in that space was hard. Far harder than Sam would have wanted it to be. There was so much of _Dean_ everywhere. In the weapons on the wall. In those empty bottles. In the pile of dirty clothes he'd half kicked under the bed.

Sam scrubbed a hand over his face and wondered what the point of grief was. How it could possibly help the survival of the species to hurt this much and wondered how he was supposed to survive with everything gone that had ever meant something to him? Mother, Father, even Jessica-though that wound seemed a lifetime ago. Above all was that aching void. That giant bleeding mortal wound that spoke one word: _Dean_.

It was in this abject haze, eyes swollen from tears, that Sam noticed a ring lying on the dresser. He picked it up and turned it around in his fingers. The gold glinted in the harsh light of the room. Dad's wedding band.

The fingers of his right hand were too big for it as he testingly tried each one, and then when he tried his left, it slid onto his ring finger. Sam sat a moment and drew in a deep breath.

He wiped the tears from his eyes, slipped the ring in his breast pocket and left the empty room.

* * *

It was some time before the lure pulled him back in. Days, weeks- he didn't know for certain as his grief had no definitive timeline. But there as he stood in that empty room, feeling that now familiar pain called _Dean_ rising into his chest, closing his throat and misting his eyes- Fate played another hand with Sam Winchester. Dean's miraculously fully charged cell phone _rang_.

It was a call directed to his older brother through Donna. Sam hesitated for the space of several beats, realizing he hadn't informed anyone of Dean's passing. As if telling them would make it more real. His grief felt private. Sacred. Something that shouldn't be shared.

As the Texan drawl on the other end informed him of the details of the incident, Sam's mind said _werewolf_ with an experienced certainty. He hesitated again. Just the space of a few seconds as he considered turning the job down.

_I can't do this without you._

Hunting without his brother had never been in the cards. But then Sam's sense of responsibility kicked in. This case was presented to him. He couldn't turn his back on people in danger. It was his problem to solve now.

And so he accepted the appeal for help as he always did.

Sam packed lightly, efficiently. The old habit of having to leave at a moment's notice still an ingrained instinct. He shoved what he needed in a small olive drab duffle. A change of clothes. A few family photos snatched from the chest at the end of Dean's bed, the amulet his brother had worn for so many years, still shoved deep into the pocket of his coat. And of course, his father's wedding band.

Sam Winchester knew how to pack light. He knew how to leave. He thought about how The Bunker had never really been a home-though they'd tried to make it their own. And maybe. Maybe there were days where it almost had been. But it wasn't like Bobby's, where the old wooden interior and cases of books and dust and gun powder felt like walking into a safe space. A space where someone older and wiser than them would take them in and guide them. Tell them what to do when things grew overwhelming. Bobby's had felt like the shared experiences of childhood.

Sam ascended the steps slowly, almost reluctantly, Miracle by his side. And he looked out over the glowing table and steel railing into the yawning interior of the Men of Letters. They'd never belonged here. Not really. They'd belonged to the open road. To the inside of a beat up, much loved Chevy Impala. Sam took a breath.

This chapter of his life was ending. He turned off the lights one by one by one until the Bunker fell black and silent and empty once more. He closed the door.

Deep down in his heart, Sam knew he never intended to return.

TBC...


	2. wayward son

Sam arrived in Texas while the bodies were still fresh. Attempting to concentrate felt like wading upstream.

He didn't throw himself into his work with a fevered driving purpose as he'd always done when he didn't have someone else to consider; someone else to pull the reins in on him. For truthfully, Dean tempered Sam as much as Sam had tempered Dean.

Now there was nothing left to temper. It felt like there was nothing left at all.

Sam was too late to save the next victim. She was gone before he'd solved the puzzle and he knew through the twist of guilt in his gut that this would be his last job. He couldn't hunt without his heart in it.

The woman possessed long wavy brown hair and wore a brown flowered sundress and was far too young to die- even as she lay there with her rib cage torn open and a lock of that hair across her pale face. Sam knelt next to her and frowned.

Not quick enough. He'd not been quick enough.

This time he did not have to hunt the supernatural. The supernatural was hunting him. Some old Hunter's Instinct made him turn around just before the werewolf ripped out his throat and he put a silver bullet through its heart almost in one smooth motion.

Sam watched the creature die and stood up from the wreckage panting, wondering why he hadn't just let it end him. He thought of Madison and how unfair it had all been. He thought of how everything in his life died or left him.

And somehow Fate knew this and Fate played yet another card because it was never truly done with the Winchesters.

The minute Sam opened the Impala door to fetch what he needed to dispose of the bodies, Miracle bolted out. He weaved his way through the empty structure with a determined purpose to his urgent stride.

The crying was almost too faint to hear. But eventually, Sam heard it too, like music from another room. He followed the dog through the old barn and there, uncovered by Miracle's paws, and huddled beneath a layer of filthy crusted tarps, lay a child.

A boy with blond hair and dark eyes. He stretched out his arms and Sam picked him up and carried him out of the nightmare and into the clear night. He wrapped him in a blanket from the trunk and sat cradling him on the hood of the Impala, shell shocked and empty after what he could only assume had been the death of the boy's mother.

As the wind ruffled his hair, and the child sank into the warmth of his arms uncomprehending, Sam didn't know that he was reenacting a scene from many long years ago.

Only this time Sam Winchester wasn't the child in the shelter of his father's arms. This time he was the father.

* * *

The decision to keep the boy didn't come immediately. Sam did his research, tried to dig up all he could find on the deceased woman. She'd been alone. The child out of wedlock. Her only remaining family a distant relative with a rap sheet for sexual abuse.

As Sam took custody of the six-month-old, the weight of responsibility for the boy tugged at his conscience.

He had no experience with children. Wasn't fit to be a father. Wanted no part of it, in fact. But all the while he kept that little life and fed him and shushed him in his arms, his heart softened to the big dark eyes.

In his confusion, he did something he hadn't done in a long time. He prayed to Castiel, even though he knew it was folly. He asked for guidance. Told Cas he was so lost. Waited for an answer in his mind.

None came.

Of course, it wouldn't have. Castiel was beyond hearing the pleas of mortals and even when he had been able to, he only chose to help when it was his whim.

And then one day soon after, Sam tracked down the boy's birth certificate. And there, in black and white letters, lay the name that sealed the child's Fate:

 _Dean_.

And the cycle continued on because it was once again _fated_ to be Sam and Dean alone against the world. But this time it was another Dean.

This time he got to make certain that _this_ Dean didn't feel the horrors of the world at so young an age. This Dean didn't have to take on the mantle of manhood while he was still a child himself. This Dean didn't have to fight and struggle and harden himself. This Dean could hold his father's hand and look up at him with hope and laughter in his eyes on a spring day.

The only sorrow that Sam couldn't shelter this Dean from was the loss of a little shaggy dog named Miracle.

But that only gave the boy depth and Sam realized that some pain was necessary in life. Some pain made us better people.

Of course, Young Dean still bore the weight of not knowing his mother, a Winchester legacy he carried on. But Sam understood that pain and made sure the boy was never alone in it. And for a time he was the center of his son's world as much as his son became the center of his.

* * *

Sam took his little charge and settled where it was sunny- away from the cloudy dark nightmares that plagued the first forty years of his life. He had spent his adult existence forging documents and flying under the radar, and so it was not difficult to forge Dean's birth certificate and Social Security number. Dean Forrester became Dean Winchester. And Sam found a quaint little cabin in the countryside and settled there.

He entered a quiet part of his life- when the storms finally calmed and for the first time he didn't exist as the captain steering a boat threatening to capsize in the windswept swells. He had finally pulled into port. He even allowed himself some moments of happiness. They were hard to trust when his experience had taught those could be snatched away at any moment-and some part of him still expected that. Some part always would.

He still fought ghosts and ghouls and monsters in his nightmares from time to time. He was always a little wary of the dark. He lay salt lines under the trundle bed and slept broken hours but he managed to put so much firmly in the rearview.

Even so, whenever his world grew quiet for a few moments, his thoughts strayed to green eyes, a crooked smile and a deep, whiskey rough voice.


	3. wayward son

Sam never did settle in with a woman for long. He thought of it from time to time, how nice it might be. He dreamt of Jessica- another old wound from a lifetime ago- wished he could have arms wrapped around him, a soft body pressed against his. But he knew those dreams were impossible. Sam Winchester remembered what happened any time he became fond of a woman and he wouldn't put another girl in harm's way again. Some scars ran too deep to reason away.

He took to wearing his father's wedding band. It made him feel closer to what bit of family he'd known and also kept women away from the handsome quiet man in town with the little boy.

Still, sometimes Sam thought he felt a presence in their simple painted brick home.

The supernatural had marked him his whole life- starting when he was in the cradle- and simply because he meant to be done with it, didn't mean it was done with him.

Sam caught her once. A glimpse. He'd been playing catch with Dean. The boy's wheaten hair had darkened into a medium brown, much like his adoptive father's, and he had begun to grow taller.

The breezy sunlit afternoon almost covered the cold Sam felt prick up his spine.

He turned at that familiar feeling, the smile still on his face, and saw her. A woman upon the stair watching them silently. Her long hair down over her shoulders, wearing a brown sundress with little flowers.

She was gone before he could react. He told himself it was a trick of the light. His imagination from lack of sleep.

But he knew.

He remembered the crumpled form on that floor in Austin, her heart torn from her chest. He knew it was her, returned to watch the little boy that Sam had taken.

That night, Sam sat in a semi circle of lit candles and asked her to leave them in peace. Told her that he had Dean and would take care of him for the rest of his life. He gave her permission to go.

And emotion choked his throat as he thought of another time, another year, when he'd given permission for someone to go.

He never knew if it worked. But he didn't see her again.

* * *

The years went both slow and fast. Dean grew quickly. First a child, then a toddler, then a boy, then a teen. And the days and years rolled by, blending seamlessly into one another. Sam occupied himself with simple tasks. Normal tasks. Fixing the house. Helping with school work. Working where he could.

He never thought he'd miss the adrenaline buzz of a dark empty basement and the gunpowder and ozone smell of rock salt hitting the wall. And part of him didn't. But part of him missed an old Impala and the open road singing in his blood. Mostly he missed his brother.

No one would ever know him as Dean had. Not even his son.

No one else had been there through his tumultuous childhood, through the hellish wreckage of his twenties. No one knew what it was like to hunt things in the night that other mortals ran away from. Or the pureness of a fight, hand-to-hand, where the only goal was to survive. No one knew what a stint in Hell was like. How the time passed and yet did not pass. How the wall in your mind broke from time to time and those memories came oozing out. There were layers upon layers of shared history and secrets and trauma and love that no one else could know.

For no one could understand, even if he had told them. Even if he had wanted to tell them. And that was the loneliest thought of all.

* * *

Soon Young Dean grew enough to start asking questions about his father and his uncle. How had he died? How had they lived? Where did they grow up? What was the tattoo on his father's chest? Sam eventually let him in, passing down family secrets best left unturned with a begrudging reluctance. He knew that the son of Sam Winchester had no choice but to know at least the basics of survival, in case that which was hunted ever returned to hunt _them._

Sam told the curious teen and forbid Dean to hunt- not realizing that forbidding things gave them a certain allure.

The years slid by and without Castiel to heal his wounds, the body that he'd used so hard in his youth ached and stiffened. Restrictions in torn muscles and over-stressed fascia made Sam move like an old man well before his time.

Young Dean moved on as young men do, and left Sam to his house and his memories.

The younger Winchester brother never had cared much about his appearance and the hard lonely years had taken his vanity, so when the hair that he never could be bothered to keep neatly trimmed faded to a wiry gray, he let it stay that way. And when his eyes that had done so much reading began to fail him, he wore glasses instead of contacts. The muscle from his hunter years faded into leanness.

He tried to keep himself busy, but without his son to fill that hole in his being, Sam remembered. He remembered things he wanted to forget. And things he never wanted to forget. He remembered all of it.

Sometimes his heart led him to the detached garage where he kept her sleek black form, polished and perfect. He'd pull the tarp from her roof and sit in her seat, hands on that familiar wheel, and think of all the ways he should have steered his life differently.

And it always came back to regret and a gaping, yawning wound at the center of his soul. A wound with a beloved name. _Dean_.

He'd learned to compensate for his absence, the way one learns to limp along without a leg, somehow still independent and yet forever altered, and part of him felt guilty that his son had never known the true him.

Because the true and whole Sam Winchester could not exist without his brother. That part of him had died with Dean on that rusty rebar twenty years before and been burned with his corpse.

_Dean._

Always, always, that refrain played like a song on loop in the back of his mind- the one that sang of the only person to truly know Sam Winchester.

_Dean._

Sam kept his home clean and in decent repair, but he never did bother to strip the old dated wallpaper or updated any of the rustic charm. It's dark bachelor feel reminded him of Bobby's. The only place he'd truly felt at home outside of Baby.

And so some of the pictures hung about were purely Sam, but most of the decor was left over from some other family that had lived there long ago- because they reminded him of the house of another lonely bachelor long ago.

In the end, it wasn't age that took Sam. -Or some quick disease, although his worn body was slowly shutting down, making each breath harder to draw on his own. He fought it, because that was the only thing Sam understood how to do. The only thing he'd been trained to do. Yet he heard his fate cried on the wind by a hoot owl, felt the veil closing around him, the presence of all those souls he had saved or banished or set free clamoring for him on the other side. He knew it wouldn't be long as he lapsed into fitful sleeping and his days ran together on a bed brought into the living room with monitors to track his vitals.

In the end it wasn't really a disease that took him.

It was loneliness that took Sam.

But ironically, his son, now grown and mature and on his own, came back to his bedside to be with his ailing father. When the loneliness became lethal it brought him back. But it was too late.

Sam was ready to go as much as his body wanted to rest. He was too tired to notice the anti-possession tattoo on the young man's arm and even if he had, he wouldn't have wanted to know.

But his boy was there. There with nothing but love and kindness and warmth. Holding the hand of the man who had raised him. Saved him in ways the young man would never know.

And Fate knew that a Dean was once again by Sam's side. And that is how it always should have been and was always written to be. Sam and Dean.

And this Dean met his father's tired eyes and unknowingly permitted him leave with the same words Sam had used to set his brother free years ago.

_"You can go."_

This Dean sat by Sam's side as he slipped into the other realm, unguided by a Reaper or Death himself. Instead a little dog named Miracle retrieved him to follow down a tunnel before fading away into a burst of light.

* * *

There was a bridge and sunlight and quiet. Sam's steps were unburdened and his body moved free and loose, unrestricted by the pain he'd grown accustomed to over the last twenty years.

Baby was on that bridge like a sentinel, gleaming, black and beautiful. And next to her...next to _her_ , stood the other half of Sam's soul.

The piece missing. The piece torn out many years ago.

He was tall and handsome and strong as he'd ever been.

And Sam knew then that he had reached Heaven.

"Hey Sammy," said the rough whiskey voice with a casually unspoken: _I've been waitin for ya._

Sam returned the smile. He'd been waiting to. There was peace here at the end of his journey.

"Dean."

The arm of his brother went around his shoulders and they leaned on the railing of the bridge and looked out over the water together. For once above the current and not swept away and pulled under by it.

They stood there, two brothers, side by side, as it had always been Fated to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. Please drop a review. I wanted to Kripke the ending and explain some gaps left by the finale. Like why Sam wears a wedding ring but we never see pics of his wife on the mantle behind him. If he was a widower surely he'd have her picture. If they divorced, surely he wouldn't wear her ring.
> 
> Also it didn't sit right with me that Sam would raise a son into hunting. Or even choose to bring one into the world with the cursed Winchester line. So this is my little attempt to shore up the gaps. Hope you like it.


End file.
